I fully support single payer. The distribution of who’s paying for whose kids’ health care is very different under the single payer vs current US scheme. Under single payer, a progressive tax system pays for health care for everyone, so that the higher the income, the more someone pays for everyone else. Whereas in the current system, people with lower income, who generally all have to work, pay for those with high enough income to have one spouse not work. Generally I think the burden to pay for someone else’s kids (and any other social welfare) should be proportional to income.
I think at the very least we should forbid employers from subsidizing spousal insurance but allow subsidizing children’s insurance. The ACA is a positive step in that direction in requiring only dependents’ insurance to be affordable but not the spouse’s.
“De facto” means “has the effect of”. Subsidizing an act that is chosen much more likely by one sex than another has the effect of sex discrimination.
From US Census data (http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p70-134.pdf, table 6), of those aged 26-64 who are covered by an employer-sponsored plan, 8.4 million men (18%) vs 21.2 million women (41%) are covered as a dependent of their spouse/partner. Apart from the small number of same sex couples, we can reasonably deduce that men are ~2-2.5 times as likely as women to get spousal health insurance coverage as part of their compensation from their employers.
I know perfectly well what “de facto” means. You believe that offering the same benefit to all is discriminatory if one gender chooses to take advantage of it more often than the other. I do not. By that standard, FMLA leave is discriminatory if women chose to take it more often than men.
My point wasn’t that men aren’t more likely to cover their non-working wives than the reverse. My point was that the differences in categories other than “not in the labor force” are smaller and you are unlikely to know how many of the employees at your company cover their spouses/partners under your company’s policy because it’s better or cheaper than the spouse can get or if there is a gender difference at any individual employer rather than at the societal level. The only way you might know that is if your plan was so spectacular that everyone covered their spouses because it was just that good of a deal. * Most plans also have only two options- single and family. If yours is one of those , it’s unlikely you know the percentage of unmarried women who cover their children compared to unmarried men (which the census chart doesn’t address). It is entirely possible that at your employer women choose family coverage at the same rate as men- you can’t just assume that men take family coverage at a higher rate because of non-working wives and not account for covering children.
They do still exist. My son pays $3/month for individual and would pay $8/month for family coverage- and it’s excellent coverage. Very unlikely that anyone he marries would have a better deal.
That’s certainly not typical of salaries paid in France.
My best guess : you and your coworker are expatriated. The company employing you figured that skilled engineers with a family are rather reluctant to move oversea without offering them a rather high salary (their spouse presumably has to quit working for the duration, children have to be uprooted and maybe enlisted in an english-speaking school, and so on, a lot of issues the salary offered has to make up for), while single people like you are typically much more easier to convince. So, instead of offering the same high salary to everybody, they propose a base salary sufficient to convince single engineers like you, and add “dependant allowances” sufficient to attract engineers with a family like him too.
If my guess is correct, you’re not paid less because you’re single, but because, lacking a family, you were expected to be willing to work oversea for a lower salary than him.
Offering the same benefit to all can be discriminatory. For example, offering a bonus for church-going is discriminatory, even though everyone can choose to go to church. We can analyze the usage of FMLA leaves to assess if it is also de facto discriminatory. Using the data here, 14.9% of women and 11.4% of men employed took FMLA leave in the past 12 months. Using the above-cited Census data, in the same group of workers aged 26-64, ~1.1 million more women than men took FMLA. On average, the leaves were for 5 weeks, and partially paid (about 57% of regular pay from table 5.3.7, but comes out of vacation/personal days more than half the time from table 5.3.8). Assuming the non-vacation pay amounts to 25% of regular pay, and using the average wage $42k, the typical FMLA leave amounts to a benefit of $1000. So taking the whole 26-64 employed population, working women are compensated an extra $1 billion total than working men due to FMLA.
In contrast, the average employer contribution to a family health insurance plan is $11237 and to employer+1 plan is $7797 (Average Annual Employee-Plus-One Premium per Enrolled Employee For Employer-Based Health Insurance | KFF). Since 12.7 million more working men than women obtain employer-sponsored health spouse/family insurance (census cite above), which amounts to $99-143 billion. So these effects are not comparable.
While there are indeed more single mothers than single fathers (11.3 vs 2.4 million), only 37% of children in single mother households have private health insurance, whereas 63% of those in single father households do (Reexamining the Effects of Family Structure on Children's Access to Care: The Single-Father Family - PMC). In some cases, the private insurance is not employer-sponsored, and in some other, they are paid for by the non-custodial parents. That leaves at most 1-2 million more women than men with employer-sponsored children coverage, a far cry from the 12.7 million spousal coverage imbalance. So the issue of covering single mothers’ children do not contribute significantly to the “unequal pay for equal work” problem we are discussing.
As far as my place of employment is concerned, I am fairly certain that, at least at the professional ranks, men are getting higher compensation than the women in this manner. In my department, of those who make over $100k (about 40 people), 80% are men and 20% are women. I would estimate that about 1/3 of these men have non-working spouses, and none of the women do. Half of the women have spouses that work for the same employer. Almost everyone is married and have children younger than 26.
average compensation via health insurance
men’s = $M(10+22x)/32 (10 men who will take it because spouse not working, 22x other men who will take it)
women’s = $M(1/24+4x)/8 (4 women who are covered as half a family because spouse works at same place, 4*x other women who will take it)
For all possible values of x (0 to 1), the men’s average compensation is higher than the women’s, by anywhere from $700 to $2800 a year using the national average for $M. I am sure there are other companies in which the reverse is true, but in the entire workforce there is still an overall gender bias in compensation for work (to the tune of tens of millions), apart from the well-documented wage gap.
As is true with the vast majority of cases of ‘unequal pay’. There’s certainly no general system of ‘pay grade’ and ‘allowances’ for family, etc in the US, nor in France AFAIK.
As far as largely group and public policies though, yes there are subsidies given for families and children. It’s pointless to debate the ‘unfairness’ of this just in the context of private employer provided health insurance in the US, because it’s creeping toward being a govt administered system in the US as it is in almost all other developed countries (the right or wrong of it is another topic). And government taxation and benefits will include subsidies for dependents/children because that’s what most voters want, have wanted, and probably will want. It’s the same with something as simple as school board taxes (or where they are included in general property taxes). You have to pay them based on the value of your property, however many kids or none you have, had or will ever have in the local schools. This is about the most elementary aspect of any kind of collectivism in society, it came even before collectivism was extended to forced aid to the poor and elderly via taxes (there were publicly funded schools for awhile when aid to the poor and elderly still depended on family or charity).
However it is fair to note that it’s money out of the single person’s pocket any of the three ways: getting paid less cash compensation at work explicitly because you are single (rare in reality AFAIK), or getting health benefits worth less (true), or getting taxed more (also true).
But as mentioned, somebody’s kids will have to not only pay your Social Security but do everything else also (fix you car, grow your food, install your cable, pick up the trash, whatever) when you’re too old to work.
Most of the developed world encourages people to have kids. France actually has one of the highest fertility rate in Europe, and it is only barely growing. The U.S. has a lower fertility rate (though continues to grow in population due to immigration). An aging population is usually seen as a liability, not a strength.
And this higher fertility rate is generally attributed to generous family policies (widely available public daycare centers, long maternity leaves, etc…).
Still, no allowances for children (let alone spouses) on paychecks.
As detailed above, the magnitude of this unfairness (why is it in quotes?) is ~$100-150 billion per year. In comparison, most studies show that the gender wage gap that is attributable to discrimination is ~5%, which amounts to ~$120 billion (66 million female workers, $35k/year median income). Neither problem is trivial.
I have no problem with the government subsidizing children, education, etc. The government has an interest in the size and education of the next generation of citizens. I have problem with employers paying employees differently based on familial status. The bulk of my objection is in extra payments for the presence of a spouse, which is illogical and discriminatory.